Doom & Gloom as a Psychological Disorder

Here is a bit from a post by Nigel Calder on his Calder's Updates blog:

... the population scare goes way back to Thomas Malthus (1798), but in its modern guise it has underpinned militant environmentalism for more than 40 years since a butterfly expert, Paul Ehrlich of Stanford, published The Population Bomb in 1968. Never mind that what he predicted turned out to be wrong. That sort of mishap doesn’t matter once you’ve been sanctified by true believers.

Ever been stuck in traffic on a hot night in Delhi? I once was in the 1960s, before I first read The Population Bomb, so I recognised the scene described by Ehrlich:

“The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.”

Yes, I saw it, and was awestruck. The exuberant bustle of what was then a rather hard-up urban population, enjoying the comparative coolness of the night, challenged my cosseted modern Westerner’s view of what human life is all about. That Delhi street was probably not very different from the suburbs of Imperial Rome or even from Shakespeare’s London on a warm evening.

Not so for Ehrlich:

“As we moved slowly through the mob, the dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel…? Since that night I have known the feel of overpopulation.”

Isn’t it comical – that yearning for the air-conditioned hotel where things would get nearer to Ehrlich’s Californian view of normality? Plainly this self-appointed saviour of humankind didn’t care too much for real-life men, women or children.

I've got to resist generalizing from one case, but my prejudice is that those who want to declare the world will die of some great calamity are psychologically unstable. As Calder points out, Ehrlich was a misanthrope, so his crusade to de-populate the earth makes sense. I wonder how many other crusaders can be unveiled as closet misanthropes whose secret desire to kill off humanity lies behind their doomster predictions.

I remember how Ehrlich's book radicalized a generation. The funny thing was this his doomsday scenario, like all the rest, never came true. But he never stepped up and admitted his mistakes. Once a doomster, always a doomster.

Nigel Calder points out how badly wrong his predictions were:

How deeply flawed Ehrlich’s predictions were! He wrote:

The battle to feed humanity is over. In the course of the 1970s the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions … hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.

It simply didn’t happen. As Bjorn Lomborg has commented succinctly:

“[Ehrlich] believed that aid should only be given to those countries that would have a chance to make it through. India was not among them. India, however, has lived through a green revolution. In 1967, when Ehrlich wrote those words, the average Indian consumed 1,875 calories a day. Even though the population had almost doubled, in 1998 the average Indian got 2,466 calories a day.”

The 1960s gave birth to dystopians and utopians. The doomsters all painted visions of death, destruction, and hopelessness... completely unrealistic. The hippies painted visions of universal love and peace, back to nature, harmony with the environment... completely unrealistic. Is it a coincidence that these diametrically opposed tendencies were born in the same decade? I don't think so.